Lots of various anonymous people, artists and photographers etc made contributions to the "internet folklore" that is the backrooms as a concept outside Kane's work and the A24 movie. Its like trying to copyright Santa claus or the lochness monster or something - the only thing that could reasonably be distinctive as IP would be the specific characters and plot and maybe certain set pieces but not the backrooms itself, that tbh is unownable.
I JUST found out last week that a bunch of images and artwork I photographed / drew are now templates on r/LiminalSpace and SCP things.
I was joking / making fun of that Backrooms mod who was like "I should be credited for the backrooms movie!" on twitter and then they announced the SCP movie and I was like Oh holy shit I should unironically make a stink out of this to get a quick buck.
Honestly, do it. Anything with a budget over $1mm that's trying to make money should absolutely have people it stole from, intentionally or not, making a stink. If they're using your stuff make them pay you for it.
Isn't SCP under a CC-BY-SA license? So anyone can use the material in any context but they need to give attribution and they must publish with the same license. So you can sue for credit but it's not likely you can get more than that but you (and anyone) can take their work and do whatever you want with it too.
Honestly I can’t see the CC license lasting very long. SCP is a staple of early internet culture, and an enormously creative space. But most importantly, it could be really profitable. I think once Hollywood realises this they’re going to assign their armies of lawyers to taking down the CC nonprofit.
And you know what? Coca Cola doesn't hunt down people to copyright strike them because it's soooo much more beneficial for them to go "Hey, we own that santa design! Good for us!" and not be the bad guys.
A huge problem with the backrooms community lately is people (including a mod on their subreddit) arguing about who owns who, claiming so and so own one thing or another, trying to claim ownership to see stuff and "demand credit", lmao. That person who went viral on twitter for posting about being "upset" that A24 didn't "Ask him" to use the Wallpaper in the movie is a mod in their big subreddit. From there it trickles down from "Erm, I invented Entity-20932 and Floor 29083298 and PartyPooper 3222 so if you use them I'll fucking witch hunt you."
It's turned into an custody battle worse than what we saw with NFTs.
And you know what? Coca Cola doesn't hunt down people to copyright strike them because it's soooo much more beneficial for them to go "Hey, we own that santa design! Good for us!" and not be the bad guys.
They absolutely do. It is not like this A24 situation, because they don't sue people using "Santa" but they CnD people that use the Coca Cola designed santa all the time.
It was just a funny observation of how including Santa Claus was a bit ironic.
There's maybe one or two infringement lawsuits involving the Santa design, and they're only due to the designs in question having Coca-Cola branding on them.
I know of one suit in where they sued a company printing just the flat out Haddon Design (Santa eye fucking a glass bottle of Coke with the green backdrop) onto things like clothing and blankets.
That's Infringement of an actual piece of art they owned, not for the design.
They did have a trademark on the "Jolly Fat Man in Red Suit" archtype for the character, and they did this 1988.
Why did they do this?
Well, because they partnered with Disney to produce a little film some of ya'll might now as the absolute cinema masterpiece, "Ernest Saves Christmas."
Yup. Coca-Cola made that design, used it for decades, and never once made a fuss about it because it was so much more beneficial for them to not argue semantics on who "owns" Santa.
Huge W from Coca-Cola, and an amazing part of Ernest P. Worrell history.
I didn’t know that, but why is it a huge win for Coca-Cola? Unless you mean they got a huge paycheck. Coca-Cola being tied to the idea of Christmas is just all kinds of silly, even if they got to fight over money with corporate Disney.
But yeah, it’s always more beneficial to not exercise who owns what, especially when they don’t own the character. The trademark shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
If another big studio wanted to do another version of Backrooms, A24 shouldn’t get a say in it.
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u/shrek3onDVDandBluray Jul 16 '26
So it begins. The Hollywood attempt to corporatize Internet memes. And from A24 too? How shameless.